Tintin Forums

Forgive me if this issue has already been raised, but following the war Tintin's adventures were published in "Tintin magazine" before appearing in book form.

The magazine version of "Prisoners of the Sun" was itself recently published in book form. What was so great about it was that there were so many scenes in it which were not included in the book edition which is most commonly available.

Does anyone know if any other comic versions of the stories are going to be made available in book form? It would be great to compare the way the comics varied from the final book edition: in the moon adventures, for example, the comic has two simple panels of Tintin stepping on to the moon's surface and walking around, while the book replaces this with a huge half-page view of the landscape.

Does anyone know if the sales figures of the book edition of the magazine version of "Prisoners of the Sun" were enough to justify making this an ongoing project? Do the publishers actually intend to continue?

Hmmm… it actually was published in 1988, then re-published in 2003, so it’s not exactly recent… ;-)
The long gap between first and second editions would suggest that the sales weren’t huge, so perhaps that explains why they haven’t rushed out further volumes.

However, they did publish a large-format volume in 2005, containing the three versions of Black Island under the title Les dossiers de Tintin - L'île noire.

This was followed by two smaller volumes, collecting the original Le Soir runs of Unicorn and Rackham as Les Vrais Secrets de la Licorne and A la recherche du trésor de Rackham le Rouge. Initially suggestions were that this would be in the Dossiers format of the large volume, and would have contained such things as the early colour version of Unicorn, from Coeurs Valliant, but this didn’t happen

It might suggest that there is a limited market for such things and that the Black Island book wasn’t a commercial success, but this isn’t necessarily the case.

The two smaller books are based on a series of reprints of the strips in Le Soir, and collect a lot of supplementary material about the strips and how the books developed which ran with those reprintings - this may not have lent itself to the Dossiers-style book (which is itself quite unwieldy to handle).

So to answer the over all questions. Are the original versions successful commercially? Very hard to say.

Will there be more? Possibly, we just have to wait and see!

It just seems odd that the facsimile editions of the colour books and those published back in the 1930s have proved successful enough to still be available in the shops.

Most of the post-war and wartime strips published in magazines and newspapers are out in book form, but why not the post-war strips published in Tintin magazine?

Well that’s probably the long and the short of it - sales may show that there’s a market for the facsimile albums, but not for collections like the Prisoners one.

Another thought is that apart from the Moon books, I don’t know that there is that much extra or different material for the other books published in the Journal. The odd frame here or there, perhaps, but even that sort of thing was often streamlined out before the art reached the magazine (the prime example of that are two pages from 714, which Hergé realized would make the album 64 pages long, and which therefore never got finished).

I was doing a search on Tintin on another issue and I came across this blog which includes a panel from "The Calculus Affair" as it was originally published in the magazine. The article further confirms that there are several scenes that never made it to the book. A major difference is that during the final escape to the border Tintin does not suddenly switch from his disguise as a Red Cross delegate to his usual blue sweater and plus-fours, rather he retains elements of his disguise, most notably a pair of Jolyon Wagg-like braces.

Personally I find these little details very interesting. I love comparing the way changes were made between the original publication and the final book version. Michael Farr mentions a lot of these in "The Tintin Companion". The facsimiles of the books have been a great success, so I think that if they put on a good publicity campaign they should get good sales out of publishing the post-war magazine publications in book form as well.

To be honest, do we know if the facsimiles have been a great success? They also haven't been without their critics - most notably the Picaros edition, which actually is a facsimile of nothing, it's been created for the sake of publishing it with a "cloth" spine...
The true comparitor surely isn't the facsimiles, successful or otherwise: it's the volumes like the Dossiers, and the Prisoners volume itself, and had these been very successful, Moulinsart would surely follow up on them.
However, looking back on it, over the last decade they have given us quite a lot of archival material, between the strip collections etc. and the Chronologies volumes etc., so perhaps it is just a matter of scheduling, and the volumes you want will follow in due time.

I agree that the changes can be interesting, but given that they are often very minor, and probably not enough to warrant whole new books in and of themselves; you might also want to consider that they may actually reflect changes that Hergé wanted to be made, and what do you do then? If they were to do anything like that, I'd much rather have an edition which showed pencil layouts and inked art.